Antony Gormley: I engineer experience

Sculptor Antony Gormley explains how his installations explore the way humans act, react and interact

Your recent installations have explored human behaviour. Can you describe one of them?I had a work called Clay and the Collective Body, which involved putting a 100-tonne mass of clay, measuring 6 metr es by 6 metres by 2.5 metres, in the middle of a well-lit, humid space, measuring 36 m by 36 m and 30 m high. It ran for 10 days. Everybody had to pre-book four-hour slots, and there were up to 100 people in the space at a time. You could say, where was your responsibility for the form of that piece? Well, it was in making sure that the conditions were constant and right within the frame that I had thought up.

So people could play with the clay but you controlled the variables?The space had no windows and a slightly high atmospheric pressure of 1.5 atmospheres. It took place in Helsinki, where the temperature was -15 °C outside and 24 °C inside. You entered the space down a tunnel as if you were going down a birth canal. You went through airlocked doors and found yourself in this very bright, very large space with this dark material. From then on, it was a random human experiment.

How did people react?This very precisely engineered context gave rise to an extraordinary and explosive outpouring of, you could say, collective unconsciousness. People communicated with each other non-verbally. At first, they would come in and be terrified by the "great clay", but there was a bunch of philosophers from Helsinki University who decided they were going to infect the place with a logical system. They started making tiny balls that they put on the floor in a 20-centimetre grid. The order they imposed was in absolute contrast to this huge mass of black clay.

And then there was a group of girls elsewhere in the room who were trying to make an invocation of their grandmother, who looked terrifying - very few teeth and screaming.

How did the experiment progress?The thing then turned into people engaging with other people's engagement. There were these conversations between people - through objects or through the process of creating - that were totally non-verbal and about communities of affection, interest or intrigue. You could apply game theory - you could apply all kinds of social analysis to this.

Were there any concerns about how people might behave?There were huge worries that people would start fucking each other or piss in the clay. We had to have two psychiatrists to make sure no one went nuts.

Did people go nuts?It was absolutely extraordinary, the way that people found each other, looked after each other, but also encouraged and extended each other's experience. There was a bunch of crazy French people who took all their clothes off and started behaving in a slightly destructive way. But, actually, everybody thought they were quite funny and when they weren't funny any more, they were made to feel it.

Have any of your other works brought people together this way?In Horizon Field Hamburg, we create a space for 100 people on an unstable, reflective black platform hanging 7.5 m off the ground from eight 22-millimetre cables. It is a very destabilising and disorientating experience, but it's important that it is so.

How does the platform affect people?Some people seem to be highly physical, doing cartwheels and yoga and Pilates and a whole load of other things - trying, for instance, to stand when the whole platform is oscillating, and even managing to do so - while others lie and watch or simply meditate on the experience of being in, but not of, the world.

The platform creates the experience of the space at large - space as an expanding condition - and the social nature of space. They can look out of the windows at a distant horizon where the cityscape and the sky interact. They can also sense the collective movement, because every footfall, every movement of everybody on that platform is transmitted through this thin, tensile surface.

Why destabilise people?I use shock tactics, but only to the extent of putting somebody in a position of reflexivity to create a point at which value might arise. I don't want to illustrate things that are already known. So a lot of the time, I'm trying to engineer experiences. And they are often experiences about which I'm not sure myself, as the author, what the outcome will be.

So how did people behave?What's absolutely beautiful is the way that people have occupied that space and become the absolute opposite of what capitalism wants us to be - passive consumers of spectacle, of information, of entertainment, of objects of desire - they become participatory and productive and cross-fertilising.

Are you trying to make a statement?I've never wanted to make art with a message, but I think there's no question that many of my works, in different ways, are asking about the connection between humans and our environment. And I think that all my installations in cities of the naked human animal in effigy form - surrogate fossils, industrialised fossils - are asking, where does humankind fit? Now that we seem to be well into the sixth great extinction, how long are we going to contribute to the evolution of life? Those are very big issues.

Can your work make a difference?Whether my work helps people think or makes people think, I can't say. It seems very clear to me, though. I'm interested in Easter Island because it's the only culture I know of that basically exterminated itself through the love of making large sculptures. Jared Diamond asked: what was in the mind of the man or woman on Rapa Nui who cut down the last tree? It seems the answer to that question is, "Well, I cut down this tree because that was what my father did and that was what my father's father did."

I think we're in the same position, but we are running on the myth of progress. My work is there to ask pretty serious questions about how we can shift our perception of what constitutes viable human actions or viable human behaviour.

How can your work do that?The distinction between knowledge and understanding is an important one. I think understanding comes from being and doing, rather than being given data. In that respect, I apply scientific empiricism to its exact opposite. I'm interested in material truth, but I want to use it as a threshold for confronting people with what they can't control, can't order and, from the base of the known, to let them look at the unknown.

Do you think that art provides more open ways of looking at human experience than science?It's a really interesting question - the determinism of scientific progress. I like to read about the continued analysis that's coming out of the Large Hadron Collider. I'm very interested in the completion of the genome project, and I'm fascinated by all of the extraordinary results that are coming out of neuroscience and the ability to map the synaptic activity of the brain.

But I think it is disturbing that the endgame for science is that we will have analysed and understood things down to a degree of detail that probably no single person will ever be able to understand. I don't like that idea at all.

It seems to me that we've got to work with biology as an ongoing evolutionary process and that without bodies, we are lost. We should understand the body as the most intelligent thing - and I mean that in a total way, rather than in an analytical intelligence of science. That's where the big cultural shift has to happen.

Profile

Antony Gormley is a British artist best known for his sculptures made from casts of his own body. He studied archaeology, anthropology and art history at Trinity College, Cambridge

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